narratives of three generations of urban middle-class - eTheses ...

interpreter’s structural location and its discourses. By analyzing context specific
meanings and usages of various marital symbols, I will argue that meaning is not
inherent in signs but discursively constructed and continually shifting. However, what is
important to appreciate through a Foucauldian and a Butlerian understanding of power
is that although meaning at one level is re-signified and creatively imbued with individual
interpretation, no interpretation or re-signification is ever completely outside the broader
chain of significations, or some kind of a discourse. In appreciating the instability of
meanings and the multiplicity of connotations of signs and expressions, we can
appreciate from a post-colonial feminist lens, the necessity to take caution before
orientalizing, exoticizing and culturally homogenenizing heterosexual intimate spaces
and their expressions that are, in fact, plural, contradictory and nuanced (Spivak, 1990;
Mohanty, 1991; Bulbeck, 1998;).
For instance, popular inter-cultural and cross-cultural representations of a married
Bengali woman often stereotype her in her traditional attire with all marital symbols. This
image is real and often imagined, gendered and communal. Such stereotypical
representation is read from some nationalist perspectives to symbolize a patibrota nari
or a husband worshipping woman, and from some feminist perspectives, to symbolize
an oppressed victim of patriarchy. Both these perspectives read the ‘text’ from outside,
imposing their meaning rather than privileging the actor’s meaning who could neither be
patibrota nor oppressed and could possibly resignify the stereotypical associations of
these marital signs by giving new meanings to the conventional action of bearing such
signs. Hence the subjects’ voices with the multiple and contradictory layers of meaningmaking
at the inter-subjective and intra-subjective level of ‘scripting’ is important to
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